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Interstellar Reconnaissance and Intelligence System
They Interstellar Reconnaissance and Intelligence System, also referred to as the IRIS Array is the primary long-distance surveillance, early warning, and intrusion detection system of the New Free Planets Alliance. It is a distributed network of both dedicated sensor platforms and information processing systems that provides real-time intelligence to both the Defense Force and the civilian sector. Design The IRIS Array is composed of multiple major segments, the most important being the information-processing and collating segment, supported by numerous clusters of supercomputers backed by a wider distributed computing network. This segment is responsible for analyzing and combining the received information into a single strategic and tactical image, from both the array's dedicated sensor platforms and other sources. The most visible segment, however, is the network of sensor platforms dedicated to the array. These are grouped into several types according to role, from short-range, ultra-high resolution intrusion scanners to long-range, wide-area sweep detectors. These platforms are distributed throughout the Alliance, in both the homeland as well as the Resource Zone and several other points claimed by or housing Star Fleet outposts. The array is designed to serve multiple purposes, from the detection of potential infiltrators and the monitoring of Alliance space, to long-range surveys and scanning to watch for more distant threats or points of interest. Computing Segment The vast amount of data collected by the array would be useless if it could not be efficiently and quickly analyzed for points of interest and to provide a general image more easily read by analysts. To this end, the most important segment of the system is the computing segment, which processes and categorizes this information. The array receives many hundreds of millions of data feeds from various sensor platforms, ships, and probes, and combines these into a single real-time database. More detailed feeds from local ships and platforms are overlaid on the wide-area scans to improve resolution. This operation requires the majority of the computing segment's power, as it must collate these feeds across many different spectra and at different resolutions into a single, useful data feed. From this, another set of algorithms inspects the data for points of interest or concern, based on predetermined criteria and self-adjusting data crawlers. The computing segment is almost as distributed as the sensor segment, but several concentrated points exist. Two gas giants in the Mutikapa System have been converted into Matrioshka brain-type computing grids to handle the feed integration, although most sensor platforms have onboard computers that handle the integration of their own feeds, reducing the number of raw inputs calculated. While these two supercomputers handle a good deal of the work, much is also assigned to other computing networks in proximity for load-balancing and efficiency purposes, to reduce latency as much as possible. The resulting single feed is then transmitted to the array's primary control center on Hettas, where it is run through the detection and analysis algorithms. It is also distributed from here across the military network, with some of the information, sans sensitive data, released to the public as a live information feed for civilian navigation and research purposes. Category:New Free Planets Alliance Category:Free Planets Star Fleet